Saturday, April 21, 2007

Recipe for Chocolate Syrup or Sauce

Google seems to lack access to a really good recipe for chocolate syrup or chocolate sauce, as I recently found out when I tried to find a recipe that resembled the one my grandmother used to make. Everything that came up on Google seemed to be geared towards the Hershey's Syrup model: cocoa powder, water, and sugar as the main ingredients.

So I got my grandmother's recipe from my mom. It has a lot of butterfat in it -- not surprisingly. Any good chocolate bar, you might have noticed, has a lot of fat in it; eating a spoonful of cocoa powder isn't the same thing at all. Good chocolate needs "mouth feel," which butterfat provides.

Here's the recipe:

1 cup sugar.

3 heaping tablespoons cocoa powder (I like to use 4, which makes a thicker and heavier taste, almost like eating liquid fudge, except not as sickeningly sweet as fudge).

1 stick butter.

1 can of Carnation evaporated milk. You can also use half-and-half or cream here; I've never tried it with pure cream, but I can only imagine . . . .

A pinch of salt.

Mix it all up as best as you can, then bring to a boil for a minute or so. Be sure to stir a lot. If you don't stir pretty much all the time, it will burn on the bottom.

After everything is over and it's cooling down, add a teaspoon of real vanilla (don't even buy artificial vanilla). I'm actually not sure why the vanilla is used here; next time, I'll have to try it both before and after the vanilla is added to see what difference it makes.

You may or may not like this. It depends on what you're used to. To me, this chocolate syrup is to Hershey's Syrup as a fine French wine is to a wine cooler -- it's so much richer and more pleasurable that the two don't even belong in the same category.